- It’s difficult to uphold the rite, especially if you don’t know what it is. If you’ve ever visited the temples of another culture - you know the discomfort – where do I bow? Can I touch that without defiling it? Do I need to take my shoes off? Should I try to show reverence that I don’t feel – isn’t that even more disrespectful? I feel a parallel unease with Manuel Göttsching. The press kit I received from MG Art, Göttsching’s label, made it eminently clear that I’d been sent an artefact whose ‘influential’, ‘seminal’ and ‘classic’ status was (apparently) indisputable. Göttsching himself seems to agree – the gatefold digipak, which opens to show Manuel ‘now’ (on the left) and ‘then’ on the right, unfolds to reveal four panels-worth of liner notes, written by the man himself, expounding his greatness. To wit:
“And here I was with a finished, faultless recording, which I had written, played and produced within the space of one evening. Should I take the whole thing seriously or dismiss it as playing around and shove it away in a drawer somewhere: an intermezzo for the archives? I listened to the tape over and over again. It certainly was playing around, but pretty damn good playing around. I had no other choice but to give it a try. And anyway – I already had a great title.”
Did you now? As the character Bertie the Bolt (James Dean Brown) declares in the liner notes to Burnt Friedman’s ‘Difficult Easy Listening’ compilation: ‘Just quality shit that is way up its own arse but, hey, we’re German, please forgive us.’
So anyway, ‘E2-E4’ begins well, starting with a few looping synth parts that interact and fade through each other. This is the great bit of the piece – it just washes over your ears for minutes on end without needing or wanting to develop melodically or change rhythmically. It’s lovely. It works. Elementally it’s not dissimilar to many of Tangerine Dream’s earlier synth-driven experiments or the arpeggiator track ‘On the Run’ on ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Nothing but modulation and transformation. The key difference in ‘E2-E4’ is the relentlessness, the size of the canvas, and perhaps (and this is its claim to innovation) its novel logic, the way it ‘moves’ like the dance trax that would make us groove to the beat of a different drum when the 80s finally blossomed into the summer of love. Or so the myth tells. At any rate, this is a single composition that clocks in at fifty-three minutes – Villalobos and Prins Thomas, eat your overlong hearts out.
But then (at about the thirty minute mark) Göttsching’s guitar seeps in, and like sewage through a cracked pipe, it stinks. You keep trying to convince yourself that it’s okay, that everything’s alright – but he just can’t play in the pocket. Noodling in and out of the groove, the very ‘Dire Straits’ (and boy is it dire) guitar work is all wrong, just the sound of a mediocre guitarist noodling around at home. If Göttsching were to admit as much, I might be more forgiving, but as things stand, so shall they fall. To my ears, the guitar completely ruins the mesmerising effects of the synth parts.
Listen to the recent EPs of ex-Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen (re-blessed by Moritz von Oswald) and hear how the whole thing grooves. Go back and listen to Can’s ‘Soon Over Babaluma’, to tracks like ‘Chain Reaction’ and ‘Quantum Physics’ and hear similar elements being taken far further, deeper and earlier. Wrap your ears around Robert Fripp and David Byrne’s ‘Under Heavy Manners’ and hear how precise, funky and fresh the whole affair sounds, even now, or (on the same tip) revisit Byrne and Eno’s incredible ‘groove musique concrete’ on ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’. All of these examples are explorations of groove music that experimented with parallel ideas of openness, repetition and modulation, but in a far more musically accomplished and interesting way.
Sueño Latino’s ’89 classic ‘Sueño Latino’ cribs parts from ‘E2-E4’, and both Derrick May and Carl Craig have offered their own (very good and justly classic) re-interpretations of the re-interpretation. The fact that Göttsching mentions this nowhere in the liner notes (how could there be space with his ego?) is doubly disingenuous. There’s a fascinating story here about the making of myth, the ritual of self-belief, and the disavowal of luck in the transformation of a sometimes fascinating, half-successful experiment into a self-declared classic. Should you take the whole thing seriously, or dismiss it as playing around and shove it away in a drawer somewhere? Well, that’s up to you. There are interesting ideas at work, but the larger part of them are around the music, not in it.
Tracklist1. Quiet Nervousness
2. Moderate Start
3. And Central Game
4. Promise
5. Queen a Pawn
6. Glorious Fight
7. H.R.H. Retreats (With a Swing)
8. And Sovereignty
9. Draw